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Democracy Doesn't Matter

Updated March 8, 2002 12:01 a.m. ET

Bruce Gilley's Feb. 26 editorial-page article, "Asia's Tortoise and Hare Story," perpetuated the increasingly irrelevant divide between democracy on the one hand and dictatorship on the other. Nothing in Mr. Gilley's arguments can hide the fact that it was economic reforms, fitfully implemented in "democratic" India and enthusiastically so in "dictatorial" China, which were responsible for setting those two Asian giants for take-off. The political structure is not the point.